Tammany Hall: How a Sleigh Crash Exposed New York's Political Machine

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In January of 1871, a sleigh crash in snowy New York City fatally injured James Watson, the secret bookkeeper of the Tweed ring. His unguarded ledgers reached the press and revealed tens of millions of dollars embezzled by a shadow government. This episode treats Tammany Hall as the subject of a biography, following its 180 year life from the Society of St. Tammany, founded by William Mooney in 1789 as a club for so called pure Americans, to the most infamous political machine in American history.

The story runs through Aaron Burr, who saw a voting network where others saw a fraternity, and through the ward system that traded jobs, winter coal, and fast naturalization papers for lifelong loyalty at the ballot box. Boss Tweed turned graft into an art, Richard Croker turned it into a franchise, and Fiorello LaGuardia starved it with the civil service exam. What remains is an uncomfortable paradox: a corrupt organization that was also the only safety net many desperate immigrants ever had.

• Burr used Tammany's membership to mobilize working class voters block by block, helping secure the 1800 presidential election for Thomas Jefferson.
• A group that sparked an anti-immigrant riot in 1817 reversed course after 1821 voting reforms and the arrival of more than 130,000 Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine.
• The New York County Courthouse was budgeted at $250,000 and cost taxpayers over $13 million, with contractors told to inflate bills by at least 65 percent.
• Thomas Nast's Tammany tiger cartoons in Harper's Weekly reached voters who could not read the New York Times, and Tweed died in a jail cell.
• After mob ties to Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano poisoned the brand, reformers including Eleanor Roosevelt and Ed Koch ousted Carmine DeSapio, and Tammany dissolved by 1967.